Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

Noelia couldn’t believe her offhand comment had led to this. Her brother’s idea was appalling — but it was also marvelous. To have company. To have a guest. Jaime visited only rarely, and never brought his wife or his children. The idea of being accompanied, she admitted to me later, sounded intoxicating. She couldn’t hide her enthusiasm, nor did she try.

“We’ll set you up in his old room,” she said to Nelson. “I’ll clear it out, and you’ll be very comfortable there.”

“I didn’t say I was staying.”

Henry rubbed his eyes. “You’re staying,” he said, defeated. He’d intended to communicate the futility of arguing, but it sounded instead as if he were turning on his friend.

“Henry!” Patalarga said.

Henry turned to Jaime. “We’ll wait for him. Stay in town, but out of sight. She won’t even know we’re here.”

Jaime shook his head. “I don’t want you in my town. I want you as far away from my mother as can be.”

“We’re not leaving our friend here,” Patalarga said.

“Your friend will be fine. You’ll take good care of him, won’t you, Noelia?”

She smiled innocently. “Of course.”

Jaime clapped his hands together. “See?”

“I’m not staying here. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You are,” Jaime said. “Let’s not argue about this. I don’t enjoy arguing.”

It was an awful feeling, Patalarga told me later: “I looked at Nelson and then back at this violent man, and knew there was nothing we could do. Henry looked as if he might cry. It didn’t sink in right away, but then we knew. It was Nelson who put an end to it.”

He held up his hands in surrender, the way you might if you were being robbed at knifepoint.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

THAT AFTERNOON,the three friends walked to the plaza, and said their good-byes in the shadow of the bus to San Jacinto. Jaime had come to watch, to verify that it all went according to plan, but he kept his distance, out of respect for the moment. Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson embraced, and Nelson asked his friends not to speak with his mother. “Better she doesn’t worry,” Nelson said, and they all agreed this was for the best. “I’ll be home soon.”

Henry and Patalarga nodded.

Then they boarded, and the bus pulled out, and just like that, Nelson was alone in T—. Now the tour has really surprised me, he wrote in his journal that night. It’s become my very own one-man show.

As for Henry and Patalarga, they rode out of T— in silence. The views along the route were spectacular: sheer mountain faces, the sky almost unnervingly blue. There were wildflowers growing at the roadside, pushing out from the dry rock in exquisite and surprising shades. Halfway to San Jacinto there was a river to cross, and when they turned the last switchback before the bridge, they came to a stopped line of trucks. Their engines were off, and many of the drivers were out of their vehicles, standing along the edge of the road in groups of three or four, caps pulled low over their eyes, smoking.

They could go no farther. The bus stopped too, and all the passengers got out.

It seemed a small van had collided with a truck full of mangoes just sixty meters beyond the bridge. “If you walk up to the edge, you can see it,” one of the men said with a shrug, and Henry and Patalarga, along with a few others, moved in that direction.

The scene was grisly. The remains of the van were strewn down the side of the gulch, metal twisted and bent like a crushed toy. Pieces of the windshield glinted in the sun, and one of the tires had come to rest at the water’s edge. It was impossible, at that distance, to make out any human remains, but the rumor circulating among those gathered at the lip of the drop-off was that there were no survivors. Some of the kids were crying; their mothers tried to comfort them. “Don’t look,” Henry heard a woman say to her boy, as the child peeked anxiously through his fingers. The only witness to the crash was the driver of the mango truck, who was still in shock. Someone said a medical team from San Jacinto was on its way.

Henry walked back toward the bus. Accidents like this happen all the time, but somehow in all his travels he’d been spared seeing one up close. He felt sore all over, in his jaw, in his back, in his hips. It wasn’t overwhelming pain, just enough to make him feel old.

A few moments later, Patalarga returned. “Three hours, at least,” he said. “Get comfortable.” They stood by the roadside, looking out over the valley. “Are you all right?”

Henry answered with a nod.

“Our friendship began to unravel then,” Patalarga told me later, “just when it should have been strengthened. I tried to talk to him, but he was hard to reach. I thanked him for last night, for telling us everything. I got no response. I told him not to worry about Nelson, that he’d be fine, and he just shrugged.”

Henry doesn’t exactly dispute this. “The wreck put me in a mood. The wreck and everything else. I couldn’t help it, but I felt like he was judging me.”

“But Patalarga was your best friend,” I said.

“That’s true,” Henry told me, “and it also isn’t true. You get to an age when that phrase isn’t quite what it used to be. There is no best friend role waiting to be filled. You’re alone. You have a life behind you, a series of disappointments, and perhaps a few things scattered ahead that might give you pleasure. I wasn’t happy. What else can I tell you? I felt like a failure. I lost everything in Collectors. And in T—, I’d felt for a moment like I might be able to get it back. I wasn’t worried for Nelson, but there was no escaping the reality of it: we were going home without him.”

This was our third interview. He was thin and unshaven, with a grayish pallor, and had deteriorated even in these few short weeks since we’d first spoken. He’d just told me a version of what he told Nelson and Patalarga the night before their departure — the story of Rogelio. It was summer on the coast, and the windows of his half-furnished apartment had been thrown open, the curtains pulled. The room was filled with light, but Henry slumped in his chair as if he’d just woken from a nervous sleep. A fan whirred in the corner. I had the sense we were acting out the very scene he was describing: metaphorically, there we were, he and I, standing by the side of the road high in the mountains, observing the wreckage. Only in this case the wreckage was him.

It was almost dusk when the traffic on the road to San Jacinto finally began to move again. All the cars and trucks and buses and vans followed in a long, slow procession, rolling along as a block, never more than a few car lengths between them, as if by riding together, they could steel themselves against the impact of the accident they’d just seen. They arrived in San Jacinto that evening, in time to catch a night bus to the coast. Everyone was tired; nerves were raw. Henry and Patalarga bought their tickets, and waited.

Even at that late hour, the station was manic. There were children everywhere, Patalarga remembers, not children who were traveling, but children working the station: selling cigarettes or shoe shines or simply begging. Below the constant noise, if you concentrated, you could hear the dull buzz of the fluorescent lights. Everyone looked like wax dummies. I can’t wait to leave this place, Henry thought. We can’t possibly leave soon enough.

At nearly one in the morning, the bus was ready to board. Before it pulled out, the passengers were videotaped, this time by a girl of fifteen wearing a tank top and a pair of unnaturally tight jeans. She had black hair, a moon face, and was shy. Perhaps half the people on board had heard the news of the deadly crash at the bridge, and as a result the taping was more somber than usual. No one waved, no one smiled; they peered into the camera’s glass eye without blinking, as if searching for a loved one on the other side.